CAUSES OF DEATH OF PHILOSOPHERS
"Gentlemen, it is a fact that every philosopher of eminence for the last two centuries has either been murdered, or, at the least, been very near it, insomuch that if a man calls himself a philosopher, and never had his life attempted, rest assured there is nothing in him; and against Locke's philosophy in particular, I think it is an unanswerable objection (if we needed any) that, although he carried his throat about him in this world for seventy-two years, no man ever condescended to cut it." (Thomas de Quincey, 'Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts')
- Abelard: Nun
- Adorno: Bad frankfurter
- Albert: Undermind
- Anaxagoras: Burned up
- Anaximander: Infinite causes
- Anaximenes: Evaporated
- Anscombe: By intention
- Anselm: Disease than which no deadlier can be conceived
- Aquinas: First causes
- Aristotle: Excessive moderation
- Armstrong: Indisposed
- Arrow: Voted out
- Augustine: Hippo
- Austin: Executionary act
- Bacon, F: Hit by idol in market place
- Bacon, J: De trope
- Barwise: Bad situation
- Belnap: Became irrelevant
- Benacerraf: Number was up
- Bennett: Taking the consequences
- Bentham: Fell off his stilts
- Bergson: Elan mortel
- Berkeley: Divine neglect
- Blackburn: Quasi-life
- Block: Trouble with bodily function
- Bradley: Absolutely everything
- Bratman: As planned
- Bruce Le Catt: Curiosity
- Burge: Something like arthritis
- Buridan: Asinine starvation
- Burke: Sublimated
- Calvin: Boredom
- Campbell, K: Epiphenomenal causes
- Camus: The plague
- Cantor: Set aside
- Carnap: Left the material mode
- Cartwright, N: Incapacitated
- Cartwright, R: Satisfied a negative existential
- Cassirer: Symbolic causes
- Chisholm: Lost his foundations
- Chomsky: Became past tense
- Christmas: Seasonally affective disorder
- Church: Recursive causes
- Churchland(s): Eliminated
- Coady: No telling
- Cohen, G: Missed the marks
- Collingwood: Entered history
- Comte: Went negative
- Copernicus: Revolution
- Cournot: Became too improbable
- Craig, E: Work of God
- Crane: Lost his representations
- Cresswell: Outmoded
- Dancy: No particular reason
- Danto: Artfully transfigured
- Darwin: Unfit
- Davidson: Unlawful causes
- Dawkins: Suicidal genes
- Democritus: Atomised
- Dennett: Lost consciousness
- Derrida: Deconstructed
- Descartes: Stopped thinking
- Devitt: Naturalised causes
- Devlin: Fell off Clapham omnibus
- Dewey: Became part of the environment
- Dingler: Unsuccessful experiments
- Diodorus: Mastered by the argument
- Dretske: No indications
- Dreyfus: Computerised
- Dudman: Conditional causes
- Dummett: Unverifiable causes
- Duns Scotus: Being univocal to an accident
- Durkheim: Suicide
- Dworkin: Lost his rights
- Earman: Inextendible world-line
- Einstein: Diced with God
- Eliot: Eructation of unhealthy souls
- Emmet: Passage of nature
- Empedocles: Cosmic cycle accident
- Epicurus: Nothing to worry about
- Feigl: Nomological dangler
- Feyerabend: Everything went
- Fichte: Non-ego takeover
- Field: Weight of numbers
- Fine: Shook up
- Flew: Met the great equaliser
- Fodor: Fell off Granny's knee
- Follesdal: Noematheosis
- Foot: Ungrounded
- Foucault: Disempowered
- Frankfurt: Revised his will
- Frege: Fell under a concept
- Freud: Slipped
- Gadamer: Lost horizons
- Galen: Lost his sense of humours
- Galileo: Stopped moving
- Gasset, Ortega y: Circumstancial
- Geach: Reference failure
- Gentzen: Cut turned septic
- Gettier: Fatal counter-example
- Gewirth: Dialectical necessity
- Glymour: Tripped over his own boostraps
- G?el: Became incomplete
- Goldman: Unknown internal causes
- Goodman: Gruesome bleen inflection
- Grosseteste: Encephalitis
- Grunbaum: Psyched out
- Gupta: Became unstable
- Habermas: A discourse condition
- Hare: Wrong prescription
- Haugeland: Entered excluded zone
- Heal: Dissimulation
- Hegel: Gave up the Geist
- Heidegger: Timeless causes
- Heisenberg: Uncertain causes
- Hempel: Explained away
- Heraclitus: Fell in the same river twice
- Hilbert: Informal causes
- Hinckfuss: Fit of morality
- Hintikka: Lost his normal forms
- Hobbes: Nasty causes
- Hofstadter: Holistic trap
- Honderich: Misunderstood causes
- Horwich: Deflated
- Hume: Turned an unknown shade of blue
- Husserl: Phenomenally bad luck
- Jackson: Saw red
- James, W: The will to leave
- Jaspers: Essence exhausted
- Jeffrey: Indecision
- Johnson, S: Kicked the bucket
- Kamp: Ran out of time
- Kant: Found the means to his own end
- Kaplan: This and that
- Katz: Decomposed
- Keynes: Too economical
- Kierkegaard: Sick to death
- Kim: Supervened on nothing
- Kitcher: Vaulting
- Korsgaard: Kant tell
- Koslow: Structural failure
- Kripke: Went rigid
- Kuhn: Paradigm lost
- Kyburg: Low frequency
- Lacan: Lack
- Lakatos: Degenerated
- La Mettrie: Machination
- Langer: Ran out of new keys
- Laplace: Prior arrangement
- Leibniz: Monadnucleosis
- Lesniewski: De-parted
- Levi: Contracted corpus
- Levina: Merged with others
- Levi-Strauss: Cooked
- Lewis, C I: No more givens
- Lewis, D: Joined his counterparts
- Lipton: Unexplained
- Locke: No idea
- Lovejoy: Being unchained
- Lucretius: Bumped off
- Luther: Diet of worms
- Lyotard: Post post-modernism
- Mach: Unsensational causes
- Machiavelli: Intriguing causes
- MacIntyre: After-virtue infection
- Mackie: An inus condition
- Maimonides: Lost his guide
- Malcolm: Undreamed of causes
- Malebranche: Occasional causes
- Marcuse: Became multi-dimensional
- Martin, C B: Lockejaw
- Marx: Material causes
- Matravers: Art attack
- Maxwell: Demonic possession
- McCall: Branch fell off
- McCulloch: Went out of his head
- McDowell: Left the space of reasons
- McGinn: Case closed
- McTaggart: Untimely causes
- Meinong: Lack of subsistence
- Mellor: By chance
- Merleau-Ponty: Perceptions blacked out
- Mill: Depsychologised
- Millikan: Devolved
- Montague: Disfunction
- Moore: By his own hand, obviously
- Nagel: Going nowhere
- Nerlich: Spaced out
- Neurath: Lost at sea
- Newcomb: Too boxed
- Newton: Kicked the bucket
- Nietzsche: Overpowered himself
- Noonan: Unidentified assailant
- Nozick: Lost track
- O'Shaughnessy: Lost the will
- Ockham: Shaved beyond necessity [or, cut while shaving]
- Oddie: Flew too close to the truth
- Paley: By design
- Papineau: Supernaturalised
- Parascelsus: Stabbed
- Parfit: Mistaken identity
- Parmenides: No one cause
- Pascal: The wagers of sin
- Passmore: 100 years of philosophy
- Pavlov: Reflexed
- Peacocke: Discontent
- Peirce: Abducted
- Penrose: Became computable
- Perry: Lost himself
- Pettit: Stopped responding
- Pherecydes: Lice
- Piaget: Undeveloped causes
- Place: Brained
- Plantinga: Of necessity
- Plato: Caved in
- Pollock: Defeated
- Popper: Falsified
- Price: Backward causes
- Priest: Became more dead than alive
- Prior: Past it
- Protagoras: Eaten by fish
- Putnam: Fell in the twater
- Pyrrho: Scepticemia
- Pythagoras: Squared on the hypotenuse
- Quine: Semantic ascent
- Rand, Ayn: Objectified ego
- Ramsey: Made redundant
- Rawls: Unveiled
- Redhead: Robust causes
- Reichenbach: Common causes
- Rescher: Incoherence
- Rorty: No foundations
- Rousseau: Contract job
- Russell: Vicious circle
- Ryle: Gave up the ghost
- Salmon: Fishy causal process
- Sartre: Nothing doing
- Saussure: Parole revoked
- Scheler: Became objectively valued
- Schlesinger: Became hypertensed
- Schlick: Collapsed protocol
- Schopenhauer: Involuntary causes
- Searle: Chinese torture
- Sellars: Slipped on slope
- Sheffer: Stroke
- Shoemaker: Loss of identity
- Simons: Departed
- Singer: Liberated
- Skinner, B F: Bad behaviour
- Slote: Had enough
- Smart: Dematerialised
- Smiley: Multiple conclusions
- Smith, A: Invisible hand
- Smith, P: Unanalysed
- Socrates: Consumption
- Sorabji: Four causes
- Sperber: Became irrelevant
- Spinoza: Substance abuse
- Stalnaker: Inquiry pending
- Strawson: Unidentified
- Sylvan: Lost in jungle
- Tanner: G?terdammerung
- Tarski: 'Death'
- Taylor: Renounced agency
- Thales: Liquidated [or also, drowning]
- Tuomela: Group decision
- Turing: Solved the halting problem
- Unger: Never knew
- Van Fraassen: Empirical inadequacy
- Von Wright: By obligation
- Walton: Make-believe
- Warburton: Went back to basics
- Weber: Overwork
- Wheeler: Manifold causes
- Whitehead: Procession
- Wiggins: Substantial change
- Williams: Bored with immortality
- Winch: Witchcraft
- Wisdom: Other minds
- Wittgenstein: Became the late Wittgenstein
- Wolf: Sanctified
- Wright: Minimal causes
- Zeno: Immobility
